Spam Kings

by McWilliams, Brian S

  During a search for clues on Tom Cowles's whereabouts, the sheriff's deputy ran across Hoffmann's site dedicated to the man and his spamming operation. At the time, Hoffmann had recently updated the site with a series of photos she had taken of Cowles's residence in the woods beside a river in rural Bowling Green. She had also created separate sections dedicated to his relatives, including 24-year-old sister Shannon; his father, Thomas Herman Cowles; and his brother, Alfred, who was serving time in an Ohio prison for rape.

  Even with the detailed dossier Hoffmann had compiled, the Wood County sheriff's office couldn't get its hands on Cowles to serve him with the court papers. So it bumped the matter up to the fugitive task force run by the state's Bureau of Criminal Investigations. In reviewing the case, BCI investigators suspected Cowles might also be involved in something bigger, perhaps an international crime syndicate that trafficked in stolen computers. Undercover agents watched the building at 1133 Corporate Drive for signs of shipments coming or going, but nothing suspicious had happened. Even Cowles's convertible seldom left the lot.

  Cowles blamed Hoffmann and her web site for galvanizing anti-spammers into attacking him. Besides the usual hate mail and annoying phone calls, he was subject to particularly bizarre telephone messages from a kook who phoned nearly every day, threatening to kill him. Cowles's 20-year-old wife Dasha was so freaked out by the calls that she refused to be in the house alone when he worked late, which was most nights. So Dasha had begun spending evenings with him in the office, and Cowles had put in a futon so they could crash there if necessary.

  That Thursday morning, Cowles was awakened by knocking on the interior door to his personal office. His sister Shannon, who was Empire Towers's secretary, stuck her head in the doorway.

  "Tom, the FBI is here!"[11]

  "O.K., hold on," he groaned.

  Cowles clambered out of bed and grabbed his pants off a nearby file cabinet. Dasha sat up in bed, pulling the covers up to her neck.

  "Tom, what are you going to do?" she asked.

  "Don't worry. I'll deal with them."

  Cowles put on his shirt and then sat down on the floor to pull on his socks and shoes. Suddenly, the door opened again, and a team of BCI agents barged in. Dasha screamed as three officers shoved Cowles to the floor and handcuffed him while others stood by, guns drawn.

  Outside, Karen Hoffmann was waiting impatiently in her car for the culmination of more than a year of researching Empire Towers: the sight of Cowles being led out of his office in handcuffs. Instead, she saw a lone BCI agent leave the building and head toward her. After she rolled down her vehicle's window, the agent in charge asked whether she had a list of the computer equipment allegedly stolen by Cowles from Marin.

  "There's a couple truck loads of computer gear in there," the agent said.

  Amazingly, the BCI had neglected to obtain an inventory from prosecutors in Broward County prior to the raid; such a tally would be necessary in procuring a search warrant. The agent asked Hoffmann, whom the BCI considered the expert on Thomas Cowles, if she could contact Marin and get him to fax over a list of the stolen gear pronto.

  "Right now?" asked Hoffmann.

  "Right now," he replied.

  Hoffmann reluctantly left the scene and raced home. From her office computer, she fired off emails to Kim and Eddy Marin. (Eddy had been released from prison in January 2002.) To her relief, moments later she received a fax from the Marins with a list of their missing equipment. Hoffmann sped back to Corporate Drive, only to find that Cowles had already been transported to the Wood County jail. A few BCI agents were still milling about, waiting to execute the search warrant when it arrived. When one of them invited Hoffmann to BCI's downtown Toledo headquarters to help write up the warrant, Hoffmann was happy to oblige.

  After she got the news from Hoffmann, Kim Marin sent an instant message to Shiksaa.

  "Guess who just got arrested," she asked.

  Shiksaa was away from her computer at the time and didn't respond, so Marin left her a note.

  "They nailed the piece of shit and they are waiting for a search warrant for the pig's warehouse to try and recover my property. Talk to you later. Karen can give you more scoop since she is there," said Marin.

  That evening, Hoffmann wrote up an account of the day's events and posted it to her web site. She reported that authorities said they found Cowles "crouched behind a file cabinet," and that the "mattress" in the room suggested Cowles had been "camping out in the office" in order to elude arrest.[12]

  At the top of her web page about the arrest, Hoffmann posted a copy of the booking photo taken of Cowles that afternoon by the Wood County Sheriff. Cowles was wearing prison garb; he was unshaved and his shoulder-length hair was unkempt. Cowles's eyes looked red and swollen, prompting Hoffmann to compose this description of her feelings about the events of the day:

  Yeah...I'm sad. Sad because there are still so many unanswered questions. Sad because his eyes are so sad. Sad because take away the crime, and he's just a normal computer geek with incredible skills that could have been put to good use. And, sad because his arrest doesn't give me any closure. Why does such a charming local boy turn to a life of crime when he has such a brilliant mind?

  Cowles was hashing out an entirely different set of questions in his cell at the Wood County Justice Center. He was astounded that state attorneys in Florida had decided to file criminal charges against him. As he saw it, the case was a simple civil dispute between former business partners over the ownership of five computers. Why were prosecutors in both Florida and Ohio dedicating thousands of dollars to such a silly case? And why were they doing it all on behalf of a convicted money launderer and cocaine dealer?

  Cowles partly blamed Hoffmann for his situation. He believed she had cajoled authorities into pursuing the charges against him, probably under the pretense that it was a great way to incapacitate one of the Internet's biggest spammers. But most of all, he blamed Marin.

  Cowles ended up spending four nights in the pokey, thanks to a bureaucratic screw up that delayed his arraignment until Monday morning. So as not to miss the event, Hoffmann and a friend arrived at the Bowling Green Municipal Courthouse twenty minutes early. Hoffmann had learned that prisoners didn't appear in person and instead were arraigned over closed-circuit television, so she took a seat in the courtroom's third row near the TV.

  While they waited for the start of the hearing, Hoffmann and her friend noticed a young woman walk into the courtroom and head right toward them. Hoffmann hadn't seen the woman before, but she immediately knew it was Cowles's Russian wife, Dasha.

  Dasha strode to the front row, turned around to face Hoffmann, and pulled something out of her purse. There was a flash of light as she snapped Hoffmann's photo with a disposable camera.

  "You have to leave," ordered Dasha.[13]

  Hoffmann was stunned. "No, we don't. We have a right to be here," she replied, looking around for the bailiff or anyone else in authority who could back her up. But the courtroom was empty.

  Her pretty face contorted with anger, Dasha pointed at Hoffmann. "We are filing a stalking complaint against you. And trespassing. You can't harass us like this."

  In researching Cowles, Hoffmann had learned that Dasha kept a tank of eight piranhas in her house. Seeing Dasha in person for the first time, Hoffmann understood the younger woman's taste in pets.

  "I'm not stalking anybody, and I'm staying right here," Hoffmann replied.

  Dasha scowled at Hoffmann before turning away and walking briskly out of the courtroom. Moments later, she returned with a half-dozen people, including Cowles's attorney, father, and sister. Without making eye contact with Hoffmann, they filed into the row ahead of her on the other side of the aisle and took their seats.

  The hearing lasted only a few minutes. Cowles appeared on the TV monitor, wearing his prison uniform and looking nearly as disheveled as he had in his arrest photo.

  After brief statements by Cowles's attorney and the county p
rosecutor, the judge set the bond at $5,000 and ordered Cowles to deal with the grand theft charges in Florida before March 29, when the judge would conduct Cowles's extradition hearing.

  As Cowles's entourage left the courtroom and gathered in a conference room outside, Hoffmann and her friend remained behind for a few minutes, hoping to avoid another confrontation. Once safely back home, she wrote up an account of the hearing and published it on her web site, along with a photograph she had taken outside the Wood County jail. (Cowles posted bond and was released from the jail later that day.)

  Hoffmann heard nothing more regarding the threatened stalking complaint. The only hint she had that Cowles was back in action came a few days later, when Shiksaa announced on Nanae an unusual discovery. According to Shiksaa, Cowles had recently assigned some very familiar names to two of his computer servers. The machines now bore the names Shiksaa.leveragecomm.com and Karen.leveragecomm.com.

  Despite this virtual nod to her, Cowles didn't even glance at Hoffmann during his next court appearance. At the March 29 extradition hearing, Hoffmann and her friend decided to keep a lower profile and sat in the back of the courtroom. Cowles entered with Dasha and his attorney, and they all took seats a few rows up. Cowles, dressed in a suit, looked frighteningly thin to Hoffmann. His skin had an unhealthy pallor, and his long hair desperately needed washing.

  When Cowles's case was called, he and his lawyer rose and stood before the judge, who demanded to know why Cowles hadn't been to Florida to face the charges there. Cowles's attorney assured the judge that his client fully intended to resolve the matter but had run into obstacles lining up legal representation in Florida. The attorney asked the court to grant a continuance to allow Cowles to continue working to resolve the Broward County charges.

  The judge was visibly annoyed by the request. He turned directly to Cowles.

  "You knew what the ground rules were. If you had been to Florida, this would have gone away," said the judge. Then he summarily announced that he was denying the request for a continuance and revoking Cowles's bond.[14]

  "Bailiff, please take Mr. Cowles into custody," he ordered.

  Astounded by the sudden turn of events, Hoffmann watched as Cowles emptied his pockets at the bailiff's desk. She was caught further off guard when Dasha stood up and started snapping photos of Hoffmann and her friend. Dasha's camera flashed repeatedly, causing Hoffmann's friend to call out, "Lady, stop taking my picture!"

  The commotion caught the attention of everyone in the packed courtroom. Embarrassed at the spectacle Dasha was creating, Hoffmann and her friend rose and quickly made their way out of the building, with Dasha snapping a few final shots in the hallway for good measure. Hoffmann contemplated getting her own camera from her car and returning to exchange fire with Dasha, but she abstained. To date, Hoffman had restricted herself to taking photographs of Cowles's property but not of him or his relatives. She considered it rude to photograph someone without permission. But Dasha, evidencing what Hoffmann considered a typical spammer's mentality, wouldn't take no for an answer.

  In an update to her web site that evening, Hoffmann described the bizarre hearing. She reported that Cowles was probably facing an extended stay in the Wood County jail unless Broward County authorities expedited his case.

  "Stay tuned for the next exciting episode, when Florida's plans for Tommy are revealed," she wrote in concluding her account of the events.

  As it turned out, Cowles spent four more nights in jail before being released April 2. His attorney arranged a hearing for him the next morning in Florida's Broward County Courthouse. He pled not guilty, posted a one-thousand-dollar cash bond, and took the red-eye back to Ohio. Then he began what would eventually become a two-year wait for trial.

  With Cowles finally in the grip of the long arm of the law, Hoffmann lost some of her inspiration. She continued to be Nanae's expert on Empire Towers and kept a watchful eye on the company and its leader, but Hoffmann didn't provide the promised updates to her site. In fact, she didn't touch it again until early August of 2002, when an Associated Press story about spam appeared in newspapers and on Internet news sites all over the world.

  The article, the second in a three-part series on spam, discussed how "relentless anti-spam vigilantes" were hounding Cowles and other bulk emailers. According to the AP, Cowles admitted to counter measures such as obfuscating the addresses of his web sites. For years, Hoffmann had been trying to get the media interested in exposing Cowles, and finally it seemed that her little web site had paid off. But then the article abruptly shifted gears:

  But Cowles is also the target of a stalker who has created a Web site larded with pictures of his home, his driving record and a pair of police mug shots from non-spam-related arrests.

  "We had to go to a prosecutor to stop this woman from following my wife and taking pictures of her," Cowles said.

  The article didn't mention Hoffmann by name, but anyone who plugged "Tom Cowles" into a search engine could easily figure it out. (Her site appeared near the top of search results.)

  Hoffmann was enraged. The article made her look like a nutcase. She had never followed Dasha or Cowles or threatened them in any way, with the exception of exposing their spam operation. Nor had anyone in law enforcement ever contacted her about any stalking complaints. In fact, state and local authorities had turned to her for assistance in tracking down and arresting Cowles. Why, she wondered, hadn't the AP mentioned that crucial fact?

  Hoffmann emailed a detailed critique to the AP reporter and posted a copy on her site and on Nanae. She noted that he hadn't given her a chance to defend herself. (The reporter had attempted to contact her by email prior to publishing the article. But when she replied three days later with her phone number, the reporter emailed her back to say he was "pretty much done with the story," and he never phoned her for an interview.)

  Anti-spammers on Nanae sympathized with Hoffmann, but the consensus was that she had no legal recourse. Hoffmann contented herself with knowing that the article had indirectly caused Cowles's true nature to be revealed. In a note to Nanae, she reported that traffic to her site had suddenly gone through the roof, the result of web surfers searching for more information about Cowles.

  Hoffmann's note also drew a reply from Scott Richter, who had been following the Nanae discussion. In June, Richter's spamming had earned him a place on the Spamhaus Register of Known Spam Operations. But he wasn't mentioned in the AP story.

  "I was wondering if you sell banner space for advertising on your site?" Richter joked with Hoffmann.

  "LOL. Yes," she replied. "Send cheesecake."

  * * *

  [11] This exchange was described to me by Thomas Cowles during an April 2004 telephone interview.

  [12] In describing the arrest of Thomas Cowles, I have had to reconcile discrepancies between Cowles's first-hand and Hoffmann's second-hand accounts of the event. Unfortunately, the Bureau of Criminal Investigations agent-in-charge at the raid was of little help clarifying the incident. In a March 2004 interview, the BCI agent said he was unable to recall whether Cowles was found hiding when agents stormed the office, or whether Cowles was simply in the process of getting dressed at the time. (Readers might wish to be mindful of Rule #1: Spammers Lie.)

  [13] Hoffmann published the details of this courtroom confrontation at her web site about Thomas Cowles and Empire Towers.

  [14] From Hoffmann's account of the extradition hearing, as published at her web site.

  Chapter 8.

  Amazing Internet Products

  Brad Bournival might have been precocious at chess, but his first attempt at spamming was downright pitiful. In October 2001, he mailed ads for an herbal energy pill to a list of 50,000 email addresses. Hawke said he had bought the list from Alan "Dr. Fatburn" Moore, who had harvested them from eBay. The addresses usually gave Hawke a good response rate—nearly two-tenths of a percent—so Bournival braced himself for a deluge of around one hundred orders worth several thousand dollars.
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  A week went by, and he mysteriously still hadn't received a single order.

  Bournival stuck with it, though. After some additional coaching from Hawke, the 17-year-old was soon pulling down nearly one thousand dollars each week as a spammer, mostly from sales of pheromone cologne and ink-jet refill kits. The money was proof that he had made the right decision to drop out of school. Young relatives and friends still in school had no money or were working minimum-wage jobs, jealous of his new career as an Internet entrepreneur.

  On Hawke's suggestion, Bournival plowed some of his spamming profits back into the business. He bought a couple of new computers and had a DSL line installed in his mother's apartment on Montgomery Street in Manchester. The phone company didn't do inside wiring, so Bournival had to snake the wire from the network interface box at the back of the building up the siding and into a window on the second floor. Inside, he used duct tape to secure the wire to the floor so no one would trip on it. But that didn't stop the pit bull owned by his mother's boyfriend from chewing through the wire one day and temporarily downing his Internet connection.

  Bournival's web sites were held together with the digital equivalent of duct tape and were prone to similar problems. In March of 2002, anti-spammers discovered that his pheromone-labs.com site, which he shared with Hawke, was insecure and allowed anyone to browse the customer order data, including credit card numbers. Someone posted a note to Nanae about the discovery and published the domain registration record for the site, which included Bournival's name, address, email, and home phone number. It was just six months into his spamming career, and Bournival had already been outed on Nanae.